Disappointment

Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding

Jarrett Zigon

Increasingly, anthropologists, political theorists and philosophers are calling for imaginative and creative analyses and theories that might help us think and bring about an otherwise. Disappointment responds to this call by showing how collaboration between an anthropologist and a political movement of marginalized peoples can disclose new possibilities for being and acting politically. Drawing from nearly a decade of research with the global anti-drug war movement, Jarrett Zigon puts ethnography in dialogue with both political theory and continental philosophy to rethink some of the most fundamental ontological, political and ethical concepts. The result is to show that ontological starting points have real political implications, and thus, how an alternative ontological starting point can lead to new possibilities for building worlds more ethically attuned to their inhabitants.

A clear and powerful rethinking of the concept of the political grounded in the world of situations rather than the subject of enunciations, Disappointment announces the arrival of a major new figure in the ontological turn in anthropology. - —Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University